Songs of Erui: Session 3

As a quick recap, the campaign opened with the party tracking down a gang of goblins that had been harassing the village of Dorsen. I prefer to start my games with dice rolling, and gave them ample time in order to figure out why they were already teamed up and heading into the Bone Forest. Greymalkin (razorclaw shifter ranger) and Grynn (gnoll artificer) were able to track the goblins to an unknown ruin that they later determined to be a very, very old eladrin crypt.Inside, they killed a shitload of goblins there were looting the place, and then decided that two-wrongs make a right and that they might as well loot it in their stead (perhaps to eliminate further temptation). The crypt is arranged with a central chamber and three linked, hidden crypts specific to three different eladrin houses. Amongst the minor items and silver that they found were an assortment of metallic icons that Grynn was able to use with his Arcana skill to open up portals within the central chamber, leading deeper into the dungeon.

The second session started with Kegan (dwarf paladin) arriving, having witnessed a figure stalking him in the forest. He claims to have received a vision from Miach (the Erui variant of Moradin) to seek out a strange symbol (triskelion), which lead him to the crypt without any sort of assistance. He didnt know what was in the woods, except that it started to get extremely cold, so he ran inside and found them.Using the wolf-like icon, they encountered a bunch of frostblade skeletons and undead wizards before running into a searing suit of gold armor packing an intelligent sunblade. In a nutshell, they managed to strip the place of anything valuable, learn that some of the swordmages can sustain ice walls, and that teleporting minions are a bitch.Oh, and Greymalkin had to put down Adrian's invoker (I cant remember his name, and he kept changing/adding more to it) since he thought it would be fun to attack party members that are unconcious and dangerous close to being actually dead. I can haz party dynamics?

Last session, the players managed to clear out one-third of the dungeon in its entirety. One of the frostblade swordmages managed to escape, but they encountered it as they tried to make it back to the crossroads, so its all good. He put up quite a fight, though Greymalkin did try to utilize diplomacy before arrows. In his defense, he couldnt understand what the fuck it was saying since as far as Maev (elf druid) and Grynn can figure, they are speaking an ancient root dialect of sylvan.After putting it down, they decided to use the silver owl icon and check it out. There they discovered a mural depicting dwarves and eladrin allying themselves against fire archons, much to Kegan's consternation. They looted some dwarf sarcophagi under Kegan's tenuous rationales of, "they don't need it," before alerting an entire hive of kruthik to their presence. This was made worse since some of the walls were illusionary, which caused many of them to get swarmed by ravenous young and hatchlings. Just when they thought they had things under control, mommy showed up and basically ruined their day.

The last room they went into contained a massive ice shard, bound within a rune circle. Now, this changed a lot from my initial design. One thing that Josh (Greymalkin) has realized is that entering a room and tampering with shit causes the dead to get up and try to stop trespassers from trying to steal their shit. Most of the chambers and halls have either a mural, relief, or some depiction of eladrin history or a bunch of graves and vaults built into them. Once shit hits the fan, bones start pouring out, skeletons start crawling out, or undead just start teleporting into the chamber. Sometimes this triggers other chambers to "wake up" as well, which happened in the wolf-crypt where soldiers and spiritual hounds started charging from different hallways.

This time, Josh decided to have everyone kind of spread out before cracking a vault. He gave the rune circle a wide berth before giving one a shot, and was ready when a bunch of skeletons covered in frost and rime started spilling out. What he wasnt ready for was that most of them were going for the shard, using it as a powerful focus for a "cold-based Death Star beam attack". I decided initially to have it grant a +1 bonus to damage with cold attacks and resist 5 fire, but then decided that they could all channel their magic into it and use it to generate a more powerful beam based on the number of frostcasters touching it.

As Greymalkin and Maev started picking them off, more frostblade skeletons showed up, as well as an ettercap husk packing four longswords and wearing eladrin armor. This was certainly not what anyone was suspecting. Kegan was able to hold off all three frostblades while Greymalkin and Grynn had to hold off the ettercap husk. Once they took out all the frostcasters, Grynn took control of the ice shard and started using it to blast apart the frostblades and spiderhusk swarm that erupted out of the ettercap when it was destroyed.